MarketTools Blog

This blog post revisits some practical tips from from Jolinda Decad, one of our MarketTools CustomerSat Research Consultants, who offered up great advice on survey design best practices for Voice of the Customer programs in a 10-minute interview that you can listen to here.

Here are some of Jolinda's key considerations to keep in mind when you develop your customer feedback surveys:

• Focus on a specific purpose: As you begin development, resist the urge to pull together a cross-functional team to start brainstorming survey questions. The best surveys focus on a specific purpose and ask only questions that are relevant and actionable. The more people involved, the more likely the purpose will be clouded and the more difficult it will be to get the information you need from the survey.
• Clarify survey objectives: What problems are you trying to solve by asking customers about their experience? Often companies are looking to understand how to meet their customers’ evolving needs within a particular touchpoint, and it’s helpful to think through the end-to-end customer experience within that touchpoint. For example, if you’re evaluating customer satisfaction in your contact center, you’ll want to think through the typical contact center experience and determine questions you could ask about each aspect of the experience, such as how long they are on hold, how they are greeted, how their issue was handled, if there was any follow-up, etc.
• Anticipate action: Think through how you might incorporate the survey results into decisions and actions. This will help you in two ways:
   
  First, it helps you determine the demographic variables you need for decision-making. If you want to make decisions based on customer segment, region, product lines, etc., you can ensure you include these demographic variables in the survey to more easily segment the data for analysis.
   
  Secondly, you can ensure that questions are asked in a way that drives clear action without setting false expectations. For example, if you sense that some customers want longer support hours but need a better idea of the number of customers that actually require this, you will want to ask whether the current support hours are meeting their needs without asking a question like “would you use support after-hours if it were available?” Not only is this question leading the respondent, it also sets the expectation that you’re considering extending support hours, which you may determine isn’t necessary if only a small percentage of customers feel their needs are not being met.

Check out the interview with Jolinda to learn more about how to design a great customer feedback survey from one of our EFM best practice consultants.

And as always, MarketTools offers ready access to experts in the fields of survey design, customer loyalty, and market research who can provide advice about best practices.  Let us know how we can help you!
 

While designing just about any voice of the customer survey, many debate the right placement of their key customer satisfaction questions such as “Overall Satisfaction with the Company” (or OSAT) and “Willingness to Recommend”.  Some place these key questions at the beginning of their customer feedback surveys, while others lean towards placing these types of questions at the end. 

There’s no right or wrong answer to this issue of OSAT question placement.  However, the placement can and likely will alter your survey results, so it’s important to carefully consider which placement makes the most sense for your business needs.

Placing OSAT Questions First
Are you trying to capture your customers’ top of mind, immediate reaction response?  If the answer is yes, then questions about overall satisfaction with the company and likelihood to recommend or renew  should be placed up front in the survey design.  Be aware that placing OSAT questions at the beginning of your survey can yield higher scores than if you place them at the end – depending on the content of the rest of your survey questions.

The advantage of placing OSAT questions up front is that you’ll likely get a higher total number of responses to them—even if a respondent drops off later in the survey, you’ll still have captured data for them on the key questions.  Placing key questions first also means that if you make changes to content that comes later in the survey, you won’t have to worry about whether those changes will impact your key questions.

Placing OSAT Questions Last
Placing the key OSAT questions at the end of the survey allows you to walk your customers/clients through their entire experience with your company before they answer questions about overall satisfaction levels.  This may cause them to recall a certain experience or event that they might not have thought of immediately if you had asked them a key question up front.  Although this sometimes leads to lower scores on the OSAT questions, it can also help clarify areas for improvement and make them more obvious.   Placing key questions last also works well if a good amount of time has elapsed since the interaction you may be questioning, or if the last time you gathered this type of feedback happened a while ago.  As the customer goes through the preliminary parts of the survey, the questions can trigger memories they need to mindfully respond to OSAT questions.

However, if you decide to place OSAT questions at the end, then be aware that any change you make to the rest of your survey content can add bias and possibly change the outcome of the responses.  If you ask the OSAT questions up front, then at least you don’t have to worry about adding additional bias when other questions change; you also keep the ability to tweak your questionnaire without having to check how those changes will impact responses to other questions that come after.

What if I’m still not sure?
There are several options for survey design if you’re still unsure which placement is best for your program.  You can test your options: start your survey with placement of the questions in either the front of the survey or towards the end, gather data for a given time period, and review how the results trend.  Then test the questions in the alternate position for the same length of time to determine which results give you the best data to drive change.  One caution in this approach is to make sure that the customers you’re surveying for each test are similar in nature, since different client types can also give different results.   

Another option – which is not done often but can be insightful as well – is putting OSAT questions at both the beginning and end of the survey, but wording them slightly differently.  This will allow you to trend the results for both side by side over the same time period, so you can really see if the results are different in a way that helps you identify changes that will achieve your overall business goals. 

Whatever you decide in your survey design, make sure you own the choice you make for placement of these very fundamental questions.  It’s important to be able to use the results of the questions to determine your next move to increase not only satisfaction scores, but the value of your voice of the customer program as a whole.   Question placement really does impact your overall results, and it’s extremely important to make a well thought-out decision that you can stick with.
 

This is a follow-up to a previous post offering three tips to effectively start a program to tie customer feedback to employee compensation.  

For some customer-centric organizations, now is the time to take broadly-shared customer feedback and use that data to motivate and compensate employees.  An effective employee compensation program is based on a mature and healthy voice of the customer program, gauged by the appropriate metrics, and structured with the right goals and rewards. 

But to keep your employee compensation program on the right track, you need to watch out for the following issues:

• Guard against manipulation.  
  The dark side of tying feedback to compensation is that you give employees a good reason to scrutinize the data (best case) or manipulate the numbers (worst case).  Trustworthy data is the foundation of a good feedback-based compensation program and you must work to protect it!
   
  Here’s one example I’ve run into several times: organizations that actively follow up with customers who give low scores sometimes feel those customers made a mistake and meant to give a 10 instead of a 0.  They innocently ask whether they can change the data to “correct” this.  My answer is nearly always a resounding NO!   Systematically changing negative answers to positive ones like this biases your results. (After all, you’re not calling those 10s and asking if they actually meant to give a 0, right?)  Suspected problems with survey comprehension should be solved in the survey.  Not in the dataset after the fact.
   
  You must also be on the lookout for manipulation of the respondent sample.  Is it possible to systematically mis-record customer email addresses or pass only certain interactions into an IVR survey to make sure only the best interactions are surveyed?  Might individuals within the organization remind their favorite customers to take the annual survey but “forget” about the customers they know are dissatisfied?  Do your reps or sales reps directly encourage customers to give good scores?  All of these can bias the final results and de-legitimize your program.
• Make your compensation goals visible, and get employee buy-in.  
  Your compensation program is a pointless exercise if members of your organization don’t take the program to heart and really strive to drive good scores.  To encourage buy-in, make sure everyone knows what the metric(s) and target goals are, how they are calculated, how exactly people in their position can move the needle, and what’s in it for them if they do.  They should also be able to see the most current scores as often as is practical.
   
  You might consider starting off the first year with a focus on upside only, and give an extra bonus for meeting certain customer feedback targets.  In a support or sales organization, think about spot bonuses monthly or quarterly for top performers to keep the metrics (and how each employee can impact them) front of mind.  Small token prizes can also be used this way on a more frequent basis (e.g. $10 Starbucks gift card for the support rep with the most perfect scores that week).
   
  As far as making the data visible, I have one client whose call center walls are practically wallpapered in customer feedback data and goalposts—that’s the right philosophy!  (As a side note: Save a tree and your sanity and use an enterprise feedback management tool like MarketTools CustomerSat Role-Based Reporting to make it really easy to share the right type of data by specific role, at any level of the organization.)

The key goal for tying customer feedback to compensation is to motivate employees to provide the highest level of customer service.  By linking feedback data that helps employees both to grow professionally and gain financial rewards, you’ll empower them to deliver the kind of customer experience that gives your company a true competitive advantage.
 

A Voice of the Customer (VOC) program is obviously critical to running a successful business. We’ve all seen statistics showing how retaining customers through customer loyalty is much more effective than converting new customers. As such, many service companies have methods in place to capture customer feedback  and track customer experiences.

However, as a market research professional, I’d like to point out some key distinctions that can be overlooked when capturing and interpreting customer feedback, because the end users of feedback data might be surprised at the kind of insights they could be missing out on.

About 2 years ago my wife, daughter and I embarked on our first Caribbean cruise on a major cruise line. Perhaps it wasn’t wise to bring a toddler on a cruise, but that’s a whole other discussion. Though the child care center had been touted as top notch, we quickly learned that our daughter was not being properly cared for, and ultimately pulled her out for the remainder of the trip.

The evening before disembarkation, the Cruise Director had all guests complete a paper/pencil survey that rated the cruise on numerous attributes, one of which was the quality of child care. Curiously, he instructed everyone WITHOUT children on board to rate this area a 10 on a 10-point scale. Meanwhile, as one of the few passengers who actually HAD a child, my rating of 1 out of 10 was lost in a “sea” of 10/10 ratings from those for whom the question was not even relevant. There was no “Not Applicable” box or “presence of kids” question enabling the cruise line’s analyst to filter responses among those with kids on board.

My wife and I no longer consider this cruise line when we’re making vacation plans, but their marketing department and executive team do not know why because the survey responses were collected in a completely biased coached manner. They have likely been seeing data for years suggesting their child care quality is impeccable. Instead of devoting more resources or training in this area, they may have even cut back. Scary. We still receive marketing materials from this carrier in the mail, and they go straight into the recycling bin.

I won’t argue that the survey administered by the Cruise Director didn’t have value, but I will argue that it “missed the boat” in terms of delivering the kind of insights that would improve their customer experience. Their existing approach of coaching respondents is likely an appropriate tool to incent front line employees to keep service top of mind, or even influence customer perceptions – just like a car dealer will plead with you to rate your experience on a post-service survey with all 10/10s. However, this type of data should not be confused with unbiased data that management can use to uncover potential issues.

If the cruise line had followed up with me with a request to fill out an online customer feedback survey, it would have been able to collect my unfiltered feedback and potentially uncover the “smoking gun” that prevents customers like me from repeating business with them. Further, an enterprise feedback management solution like MarketTools CustomerSat  would also enable them to more easily collect verbatim comments in addition to responses to survey questions, and analyze those comments using text analysis  – so I could have provided some telling details about their child care issues.

In the end, it’s necessary to construct and run your Voice of the Customer program(s) based on the information you want to collect, while understanding the potential biases. Coached survey administration to monitor front line employee behavior can be very useful, but it will disguise insights that reflect real customer concerns. With careful planning and execution, an effective VOC program can be designed to successfully accomplish both.
 

Often when I’m working on global customer satisfaction surveys, I come across a common concern from business leaders outside of North America.  These leaders tell me they have seen their customer satisfaction scores compare unfavorably to scores from North America, even as they do all the right things to build up customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Year-over-year, they see their scores improve, but the North America scores go even higher.  They are concerned that management sees this gap and concludes that they are doing something wrong, and sometimes this concern even leads them to be resistant to the whole survey process.

And they’re right to be concerned.

As researchers, we know that there truly are cultural differences between survey respondents, and as much as we may caution our clients that Voice of the Customer / customer loyalty scores across regions aren’t directly comparable because of these differences, it’s human nature (and a very legitimate business question) to wonder how different regions measure up against each other.

So how can we disentangle true regional differences from artificial cultural ones?  Like most things in survey research, it all starts with solid questionnaire design!

Here are a few tips for improving cross-cultural customer satisfaction surveys: 

• 1.    Label only the endpoints of the ratings scales in your survey.  Fully labeled ratings scales present a translation challenge across multiple languages which can introduce cultural bias.  Are “Excellente” and “Bueno” the same distance apart on a scale in Spanish as “Excellent” and “Good” are in English?  The fewer points you label, the less likely you are to skew your scale due to translation issues.
   
• 2.    Use even scales.  Avoid offering a scale midpoint—some cultures are predisposed toward selecting a midpoint response if it is made available. 
• 
  3.    Avoid using “Agree” and “Disagree” as the anchors of your ratings scales.  Some cultures tend toward the “agreeable” answer more than others, which can skew cross-cultural comparisons for questions using agreement scales.
   
• 4.    Use extra care in selecting metrics.  Top- and bottom-box metrics as well as NPS focus on scores at the extreme high or low ends of the scale, neglecting scores in the middle.  This can amplify cultural differences since some cultures tend to use the middle of the scale more while others tend to respond more toward the endpoints.  

  5.    Consider including a control vignette.  Control vignettes ask the respondent to respond to a specific scenario that is presumed to be interpreted identically across cultures in order to establish a cross-cultural baseline.  

  I have seen very elaborate vignettes that pose a hypothetical scenario external to the respondent; for example:  Sally is a long-time customer of Acme, is very happy with their products, and recommends Acme to her friends.  How would you rate Sally’s overall satisfaction with Acme?  Other vignette techniques ask the respondent to name a company they personally consider “Best in Class,” and then to rate that company on the same key survey metrics they are rating the subject of the study on.

  These vignette techniques allow you to establish a theoretical maximum score on your key measures for each culture you are interested in.  You can then compare your own scores to these theoretical control scores—and the amount by which each group is underperforming the theoretical max can be compared across cultures.

Don’t let fears and misconceptions about making cross cultural comparisons stop you from getting the data you need to run your business!  These techniques will help to ensure you get the best possible cross-cultural data.

► Learn more Best Practices for Customer Survey Design

Last month, MarketTools released an EFM Marketplace Report that revealed, among other things, that 94% of companies are not yet using social media for customer feedback. I wasn’t surprised to see this, and I also wouldn’t have been surprised to see a report that said 94% of firms are talking about using social media to collect feedback but didn’t yet have an implementation strategy outlined.  (Something that we touched on in a previous post – Social Media Strategy: Change the Conversation.)

While there’s no doubt that companies need to include social media feedback to get the entire picture, it’s important not to lose sight of the channels that are already working and won’t go away any time soon. While there’s no doubt that companies need to include social media feedback to get the entire picture, it’s important not to lose sight of the channels that are already working and won’t go away any time soon. The study we conducted for our Marketplace Report found that the most common ways companies gather customer feedback are:
-    Email/online surveys: 51%
-    Formal phone surveys: 28%
-    Informal phone calls: 28%
More information about the study

What’s great about these channels is that by actively soliciting customer feedback, you get to ask about what YOU want to know, not just hear about the sometimes extreme outlying circumstances that warrant a social media post. A well designed customer survey can benefit sales, product development, support and other departments, and provide the information you need to take strategic action in the following areas:

1)    Investment Planning: well-designed surveys help you identify key drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty, so you know where to focus your efforts and your resources for maximum impact. Customer survey data can also help justify investments based on hard facts – helping to make a clear case for product improvements, packaging changes or service quality improvements. Or not… sometimes organizations find that the things they think they need to invest in to improve customer satisfaction aren’t really that important to customers, which helps save significant time and money.

2)    Service Recovery: with proper action management and alert capabilities, you can follow up with customers just minutes after they submit their survey and save at-risk relationships. Showing people that you not only take the time to listen to their feedback but actually ACT on it goes a long way towards creating loyalty and competitive advantage.

3)    Agent Performance Management: surveys give you a reality check on agent performance, allowing you to identify and reward top performers as well as opportunities for coaching and improvement.

4)    Opportunity Identification: people often forget that surveys can be a great source of lead generation and PR. Many customers we work with have found that surveys can serve as a reminder of the company’s offerings, and the act of taking a survey engages customers to think about how else they can work together. Surveys are also often used to identify happy customers that have a great story to tell – providing an excellent source of referrals and marketing content.

While I believe social media is more likely to “break through” this year as a standard feedback channel, formalized survey programs aren’t going anywhere – the key is to balance the solicited feedback with the unsolicited for a complete picture of customer wants, needs and expectations. 

This post was adapted from the MarketTools Zoomerang blog.

When designing a survey questionnaire, it is almost always useful to include a few open-ended questions. An open-ended question is designed to encourage a response that is spontaneous and unstructured. (Of course, this is the opposite of a closed-ended question which encourages a brief or single-word response usually answered with a simple yes or no.)

Don’t overdo it, though: having too many open-ended questions in your online survey can confuse and sometimes annoy your respondents. Start off with closed-ended questions and interlace open-ended queries throughout the form to keep your survey takers on point. 

With that being said, here are six open-ended questions to consider when building your online survey questionnaire:

• What would it take to get you to use or buy a product or service?
  This question can help aggregate your learnings from previous findings, while also highlighting problems and issues that may have gone unnoticed.
• What is the best thing about the product, service, or campaign?
  Asking what the BEST thing about the experience is instead of a more general “what did you like?” question can drill down and find positive feedback even if the respondent was dissatisfied overall.
• What is the worst thing about the product, service, or campaign?
  This question can yield some very surprising answers and give new insight into deeper customer perceptions.
• What would your business associates and/or friends think of this product, service, or campaign?
  Moving the question into the third person can open up the respondents’ feelings about their willingness to share with others.
• Would you recommend this product, service or campaign to your friends or family members, and why?
  This is similar to the previous question, but  more personal. It gets straight to the point as to  whether the respondent likes your offerings enough to suggest it to friends and family.
• What task or action did you perform immediately prior to using the product or service?
  This question can provide useful insight into the respondent’s experience with your offering, or how they came to have a need that your product or service fulfilled. For example, it can be useful to know if the respondent is running out the door for their daily commute, or sitting down to relax before they use a particular product or service.

These open-ended questions can lead to a deeper understanding of your survey respondents as they use their own words to respond and better describe their experience.  Just make sure to use these types of questions thoughtfully, and to only include the ones that are most important to capturing the kind of survey feedback that will help you achieve your desired business results.

What kind of success have you had using open-ended questions? Which questions have offered up the most interesting responses? We would love to hear your feedback.

Hot on the heels of the Customer Experience event I wrote about last week, I had the opportunity to attend IQPC’s Customer Feedback Week in Rosemont, IL (Chicago area). Not only did I get to see two of our customers – Simon Leech of American General Life Insurance Companies and Pam Plyler of United Stationers – speak about their Voice of the Customer program success, but I also had the opportunity to understand how companies are using feedback data to drive real change within their organizations.

Here’s what I didn’t see last week:  downtown Chicago!

Let’s face it – the idea of gathering feedback from customers, employees and partners intuitively seems like “the right thing to do.” And yet, as we discussed in a recent “Economics of Customer Experience” webinar with our partner Strativity, some companies find it challenging to justify investments in something that “feels good.” The interesting thing about feedback is that while it can sometimes seem ethereal, at the end of the day it provides cold hard facts that can help cut through a lot of opinions and assumptions. Here are some examples provided at the conference of how feedback data was used to prioritize strategic business decisions and improve business processes:

Corporate initiatives: Putting real customer data in front of executives can make priorities clear and rally cross-functional teams. There was a great example at the conference of an insurance company that created an internal initiative to speed up their claims processing. It “felt like” the right thing to invest in. And yet when customers were surveyed, the results revealed that they were happy with the amount of time it took to process claims – their bigger concern was the lack of empathy of the people processing their claims. The company was able to use this insight to invest in empathy training for service reps instead of finding a way to speed processing time – a much smaller investment than originally planned.

Training: Many companies already use feedback data to help pinpoint areas where customer service reps need training. Leading organizations are taking it a step further by actually incorporating real feedback into training sessions to make it more real and more specific. For example, you can show both positive and negative survey responses to help call center reps understand exactly how their actions impact customer attitudes. It’s an ideal use of “voice of the customer” data, and an incredibly powerful lesson in learning how to deal with real situations and emotions as opposed to made-up training scenarios.

Product Development: Product improvement requests are often peppered with emotion, and many times it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. Looking at real survey data is extremely valuable for assessing requests from people that speak loudly but speak only for the minority. This is especially helpful when debating about whether to invest in improving a current product vs. developing a new one – do you need to invest in product improvements if most customers are highly satisfied? On the flip side, does it make sense to invest in new product development if customers are abandoning your current product due to dissatisfaction? Feedback data can help to answer these questions in a more tangible way.

Call Center Operations: After a few years of backlash against offshore call centers, some companies have the general impression that offshore or outsourced support centers do not provide the same level of service as domestic or employee-based support. Surveys are an excellent way to determine whether or not that impression is true and make improvements where necessary. One of the speakers at the IQPC conference found that overall customer satisfaction scores for U.S. vs. offshore support were the same – and he used that data to shut down arguments against making a very expensive investment to increase U.S. based support.

These are just a few examples of how companies are using the insights generated by EFM programs as a fact-based decision tool for prioritizing investments. The opportunities for using feedback are endless – we’d love to hear your examples. Please comment below!

As Voice of the Customer / customer loyalty researchers, we recognize that at the root of every loyal or disloyal customer is a history of interactions—calls with sales, tech support, maybe an installer or a billing specialist.  We know that each one of these customer interactions has the power to impact customer loyalty.

The survey process is an interaction as well.  It is a chance for the customer to tell you how well you are performing.  Like any other interaction, it can be handled well or handled poorly.

Our best advice to researchers designing their feedback program is to channel the principal tenet of the Hippocratic Oath, “Do No Harm”.  This should be the primary consideration in the decision making process at every step of designing/implementing a satisfaction measurement program.

Obviously the first step is to work with the right partner so you know you’ve designed an excellent survey (just the right length, focused questions, only the required open-ended questions, etc.).  This is critical.  But don’t spend weeks refining and vetting the survey instrument, just to leave other key parts of the interaction to the last minute (or even until after the survey is live!).  Here are some other areas that should be given equal consideration when designing a feedback program.

Pre-Survey:
A personalized email is generally preferred to a generic greeting.  However, personalization requires a reliable database.  I would rather receive an email with “Dear Valued Customer” than any of the following:

Dear MIKE MILBURN  (why are you yelling at me?)
Dear mike milburn  (only acceptable if gauging opinion on the poetry of ee cummings)
Dear milburn mike  (do I even need to explain?)
Dear tbd unknown  (am I a client of yours or not?)
Dear Mrs. Milburn  (would be ok if it was for my wife, this one wasn’t)
(By the way, avoid Mr., Ms., or Mrs. unless you are absolutely sure, and even then, don’t)

Is your database ready for the survey process?  Even if it is accurate 99.5% of the time, 10,000 emails could yield 50 upset/turned off invitees.

Follow up on specific requests:
Often companies will include a survey question asking respondents if they want someone from the company to contact them.  If a respondent says yes, then contact them — you have now set an expectation that you need to follow through with.  It sounds simple, but many companies turn this kind of opportunity to interact with an individual respondent into a reason for the respondents to feel as if the company doesn’t value them when they neglect to follow up.  Loyalty is an emotion; hurt feelings will quickly damage the relationship.

Also, companies may ask if the respondent needs certain materials, documentation, etc.  Again, if someone says they  need it, provide it.  I have seen programs where, 6 months in, the client has removed this type of question because they realized no one in their company had been following up on it since the program began.  That is 6 months of setting expectations and not fulfilling any of them.

Do you have the infrastructure in place to deal with the volume of contact or information requests?  If not, you are better off not asking these questions until you do.

Survey follow-up (in general):
The ability to follow up in real time with respondents who give low scores to your survey can be very powerful.  Imagine this from the respondent’s point of view:  Let's say I had a bad experience, I expressed it in your survey and that same day I get a phone call from your company.

“Hello, is this Mike Milburn?  Thank you for providing feedback recently on your service experience.  I understand things were not handled up to our usual standards.  I’d like to take a minute to discuss…”

Think about it.  I am no longer a nameless person throwing my feedback into a void.  Someone saw my responses and acted on it.  I’m now part of the solution.

Much better than this call:  “Is this Mike?  Yeah, Mike, why did you give us a 2 on courtesy and professionalism?”  (Hmm, I wonder.)

Companies spend millions of dollars putting the right messaging campaigns together.  Yet, when following up with respondents in critical one-on-one interactions, these events are often left to the whims of the individual reaching out to the client.

Do you have a scripted, structured follow-up mechanism in place?  If not, how do you know these interactions are being handled in a consistent, professional manner?

A feedback program is another opportunity to interact with your clients.  How you interact with them is up to you.  At every step of the process, let “Do No Harm” guide your decisions.

One of the things I enjoy most about working at MarketTools is the ready access we have to true experts in the fields of survey design, market research, customer loyalty, survey panel management – you name it – who can provide best practices advice. Just last week I was fortunate to interview Jolinda Decad, one of our MarketTools CustomerSat Research Consultants, to discuss survey design best practices for EFM (enterprise feedback management). Here are some highlights of what I learned – or you can hear the entire interview here (about 10 minutes).

•  Focus, Focus, Focus:  As you begin, resist the urge to pull together a cross-functional team to start brainstorming survey questions. The best surveys focus on a specific purpose and ask only questions that are relevant and actionable.  The more people involved, the more likely the purpose will be clouded and the more difficult it will be to get the information you need from the survey.
• Clarify survey objectives:  What problems are you trying to solve by asking customers about their experience? Often companies are looking to understand how to meet their customers’ evolving needs within a particular touchpoint, and it’s helpful to think through the end-to-end customer experience within that touchpoint.  For example, if you’re evaluating customer satisfaction in your contact center, you’ll want to think through the typical contact center experience and determine questions you could ask about each aspect of the experience, such as how long they are on hold, how they are greeted, how their issue was handled, if there was any follow-up, etc.  
• Anticipate Action:  Think through how you might incorporate the survey results into decisions and actions. This will help you in two ways:
  - First, it helps you determine the demographic variables you need for decision-making.  If you want to make decisions based on customer segment, region, product lines, etc., you can ensure you include these demographic variables in the survey to more easily segment the data for analysis.

  - Secondly, you can ensure that questions are asked in a way that drives clear action without setting false expectations. For example, if you sense that some customers want longer support hours but need a better idea of the number of customers that actually require this, you will want to ask whether the current support hours are meeting their needs without asking a question like “would you use support after-hours if it were available?” Not only is this question leading the respondent, it also sets the expectation that you’re considering extending support hours, which you may determine isn’t necessary if only a small percentage of customers feel their needs are not being met.

That’s only the beginning – learn more about how to design a great customer feedback survey from one of our EFM best practice consultants.